Seven o'clock had come and gone by the time I reached St. Ursula again. No one had mourned its passing. My tour of Hobbes Landing had been interesting, but hardly useful. I still had no plan to find the heartless bastard that Amber had called Hank. I passed Pete's Pour House and reached the corner, stopping at the curb. For one glorious moment, I considered abandoning this dubious endeavor.
I shook my head at myself. I wasn't leaving Hobbes Landing. Not until I did what I came to do. Hank was unlisted. I wasn't going to be able to get his address.
I couldn't go to him. So that left one solution. It was surprisingly simple when you got right down to it.
I had to make him come to me.
The light over the intersection flicked from red to green.
A few cars accelerated up Hucknall in the direction of Collingswood, and another couple passed by on their way toward Ward Boulevard. They were driven by ordinary people, on their way to work, on their way home, settling into the tedious rhythms of their day. None of them would drive a stolen vehicle to another state to chase a man with one name and an unlisted phone number.
I didn't move. I had nowhere to go and nowhere to be. I stood at the intersection where Cortland Avenue crossed Hucknall Road. It was as good a place as any other. I stood about the same chance of running across the man named Hank right here at this intersection as I did hiking from one end of Hobbes Landing to the other and back.
So I stood, and I thought. Here on this bustling corner in this historic borough of New Jersey, the gears of my mind felt clogged with early-morning exhaustion. The sun burned too brightly in the sky, reflecting and refracting across a cloudless sheet of vibrating cerulean. My task felt all at once too colossal. Because I was a seventeen year old kid with a folded scrap of paper in my pocket, wandering unknown streets in search of an unknown man.
I was insignificant, irrelevant. Inconsequential. I could throw myself into the traffic rumbling along Hucknall and get run down by a York Brothers box truck, and be buried out there in an unmarked grave at the back of Eternity Hill Memorial Park, or have my shattered body thrown into a dumpster behind the Schanne Sweet Shoppe, and the world would go right on spinning just as it has for epochs and eras and eons untold. I could spontaneously combust right here on this street corner under the overheated glare of the morning sun, and the rest of humanity would continue into the future without me. Just as it should.
I stood at the intersection of Cortland and Hucknall as the universe unfolded, unwound, ended, rewound, restarted, played forward, brought me back once more to the places I had been. To a bustling corner in downtown Hobbes Landing. Such as it were. The traffic light over the intersection flicked from green to yellow, from yellow to red. I waited. For a sign. A revelation. Whatever was supposed to happen next. Because I had no plan.
Forty seconds passed. A long white bus pulled to the light headed toward Ward Boulevard. Three diagonal stripes in orange, purple and blue marked its flank, along with the word NJTransit. It was not a sign, or a revelation. It was a public bus. But I knew that I was not irrelevant, even though nothing I did would change the world.
Because it didn't matter whether I mattered to the rest of the universe, as long as I mattered to the right people. And I thought that maybe I did. That maybe I mattered to Regina, whose nightmare had saved my life, and to Helen, whose constellation of freckles looked so much like Orion the Hunter. And maybe I mattered to Ethan, who was dead and buried under a yellowed lawn in Meadowbank, and maybe I still mattered to him because not even death matters to the right people.
It was even possible that I mattered to Amber.
The idea thrilled me, filled me with fantastic terrors. It burned away the exhaustion in my mind like a nightfog burned away by the light of dawn. Across the street, in front of a music store called Just Jay's, I spotted a scarred plexiglass cubicle housing a bench near the curb. Three people stood inside the partition of the bus stop. Waiting. Not for a sign, or a revelation, but for the NJTransit bus to carry them into the tedious rhythms of their day.
I glanced back in the direction I had come, the direction of Alexander Hobbes. The light turned green again. The bus pulled forward to the plexiglass cubicle in the opposite lane and stopped. I saw the wooden front door to Pete's Pour House twenty paces up the sidewalk, and next to it a payphone standing against the brick wall. I smiled.
I could draw out the man named Hank.
6.
I tucked my newspaper under my arm and crossed the wide sidewalk to the payphone.
I didn't even hesitate. I picked up the receiver, held it to my ear, dug into my pocket for a handful of change and the small slip of paper that another Michael Everett had stapled into a faded-green notebook. I silently thanked him, picked four quarters out of my palm, and dropped them into the slot on the phone. I looked at the number scribbled onto the small slip in a cramped handwriting I didn't recognize, laughed, punched in the digits.
The phone rang once, twice, a third time. I considered what I intended to say when the line connected, but came up empty. By the fourth ring, I started to think that the man called Hank wasn't going to answer. Maybe he wasn't home. Maybe that other Michael Everett had transposed a pair of numerals. That would be just my luck. But then the line connected halfway through the fifth ring, and a foggy voice answered. "Hello?"
My mind went instantly, blissfully blank. I held the receiver to my ear, and said nothing. I had no plan, after all, and this was what I got for all my trouble. Silence. Like peace; like rest. Like death. After all these miles and all these hours, I had nothing to say to the heartless bastard that Amber had called Hank.
I blinked twice, hard, shook my head. I hadn't come this far to cry off now. There was only one way to do this, and that was to do it. I lowered the mouthpiece, pressed it lightly to the side of my throat, said low and tight, "How many times are we gonna do this bullshit, Hank?"
Silence shot from one end of the line to the other. It was a reckless opening gambit, especially considering that I had only devised it at roughly the moment that the mouthpiece had touched the side of my throat. I had left myself no margin for error. Either it would work, or it wouldn't. I waited for a harsh click, ten seconds of silence, and a dial tone. But it felt right, so I didn't think too precisely on the event. Better to act than to think.
There was no click. No dial tone. I heard breathing on the far end of the line, and I knew that this was the man named Hank. He said nothing for a dozen seconds, and I waited him out. He didn't hang up. Then he broke his silence and demanded, "who the fuck is this?"
Panic flickered in my chest. I crushed it. Because under that brashness I heard a cautious tone of familiarity. He had an idea who the fuck this was. I just had to give him a reason to believe that I was whoever he thought was.
"Really?" I demanded, managing to sound annoyed without really trying. "Are you fuckin serious?"
Hank didn't answer. He just kept breathing into the mouthpiece, making up his mind. I gave him six seconds to make his decision. When he still hadn't hung up, I knew he was right on the edge. So I gave him a little nudge.
"I ain't playing this game today, dude," I told him.
Something rustled from his end before he answered. "Jesus Christ, man," he said, and his voice shifted. He lost none of his brashness, but he talked to me now like he knew me. In his foggy mind, I was sure that he did. "You can't just call me up out of the fuckin blue like this."
No, I heard myself think inside my head. It can't be that easy. The thought sounded so close, so real, that I glanced back over my shoulder, the receiver still pressed to my ear, the mouthpiece against my throat. That voice sounded so much like mine that I expected to find my own spectral reflection grinning at me from across the street. Standing in the doorway of Just Jay's, or sitting on the bench of the bus stop. His mad grin would be the last thing I would see before my sanity flaked away like paint peeling from the desiccated slats of a skewed fence.
I recognized no one. These
were just ordinary people, on their way to work or on their way home, settling into the tedious rhythms of their day. I laughed at the grisly thought of my own madness. I heard Hank breathing on the other end of the line again, and realized that would think I was laughing at him. At his brash insistence that I couldn't just call him up out the fuckin blue like this.
I laughed again. I couldn't help it. Because I had done just that, and this heartless bastard would never know the infinite will it had taken to accomplish such impossible work. So I laughed. I had stepped out of the crashing blue under the dying reflection of a bleak moon, and I had wandered through a valley of shadows to get to him.
I had called him from a phone on the sidewalk outside Pete's Pour House in an unfamiliar town, convinced him that I was someone else. Someone he knew. And of all the ridiculous possibilities, it had been the word dude that had convinced him. It really had been just that easy.
So I laughed. I couldn't help it. "You want me to drop by instead?" I asked, glancing to the tavern's door. At a reading Breakfast served 6am – 8am. Bar opens at 3.
Hank sucked in a hard breath. "You ever show up at my place," he said, his own voice low and tight, "your own mother won't recognize what's left of you."
"Dude," I laughed again, just once. "My mom wouldn't recognize what's left of me if I offered her a pack of smokes for a blowjob," I told him. Then I went silent. I stared at my warped reflection in the dented sheet of metal behind the payphone, shocked at my own words. They sounded a little too genuine in my own head. Hank snorted, and I didn't like the sound of it. But mostly I wondered if Hank was the only one who thought I was someone else.
More rustling crossed the line from his end, and liquids splashed in the background. Hank grunted into the phone, then said, "I got the rest of your stuff, man."
"Good," I said. A topless Miata convertible pulled up Cortland to the intersection and stopped at the light. Three teenage girls rode in the car, wearing oversized sunglasses. I wondered what their story might be. Where they were going; where they had been. What long and curving path they were following through the world. One girl spotted me, laughed, waved. She thought I was cute, or she was making fun of me. It didn't really matter. I waved back. She laughed again, delighted. Blew me a kiss. The traffic light flicked from red to green. The Miata cut left.
"—to wait `til tomorrow, man," Hank was saying.
I shook my head. The mouthpiece slipped away from the side of my throat. I answered, and I couldn't stop the word. "Can't." I froze, the receiver pressed to my ear, and listened. I breathed through my nose, angled the phone slowly back to the side of my neck. I waited for Hank to figure out that I wasn't the person he thought I was.
"Well why the fuck not?" he demanded instead.
I grinned. I couldn't help it. "If that was any of your fuckin business, you'd already know."
"So you can't wait one fuckin day for—" he started.
"Hank," I cut him off, sighing, making it clear just how tiresome I found this whole conversation. "I'm down here at Pete's Pour House. You remember where that is?"
It was another risky gamble. But this one felt right as well, and I took the chance. "Yeah?" he said.
I almost laughed. "Then get the fuck down here."
"I gotta be at work in a fucking hour, man."
"Good," I said. "I got somewhere to be at eight." That almost certainly wasn't true. Hank almost certainly didn't know that. I told him, "You got ten minutes, dude."
And I hung up the phone.
I stood at the payphone for a long moment, watching my own dented reflection.
My hand held onto the receiver, as if letting go would finalize this lunatic transaction. It occurred to me that I could drop four more quarters into the phone and punch in Hank's number and tell him this had all been a huge misunderstanding, a fabulous joke. I could tell him he didn't need to come down to Pete's Pour House. He could meet the guy he knew tomorrow like he planned.
I could do that. As long as I didn't let go of the receiver. Because once I let go, the deal was done. If I let go and then changed my mind and tried to call Hank again, an automated voice would tell me that the number was no longer in service. Or it would go on ringing forever and never be answered. Or it would click once, perhaps twice, and then drop off into infinite silence.
Or maybe it would connect. Maybe I would hear that thought from inside my head that sounded too much like my own. It might tell me that I had reached the fractured psyche of Michael J. Everett. He wouldn't be available at the moment, but if I left my name and number and a brief message, he would get back to me as soon as possible.
I shuddered. A chill that had nothing to do with the temperature shot up my spine, and my skin broke out in electrified gooseflesh. This was insane, and it was going to get me killed. I cracked a mad grin at the grisly thought of my shattered body lying in a dumpster behind the Schanne Sweet Shoppe. My dented reflection grinned back at me.
I let go of the phone. Because Hank was on the hook now. And I was going to reel him all the way in.
I looked away, down toward St. Ursula. I could see the mouth of the driveway that I had turned down to park the Wagoneer. I would have a clear line of sight.
I hiked my backpack higher up onto my shoulder, checked the traffic, and crossed Hucknall toward the bus stop. A man already sat at one end of the bench, chattering into a cellphone. "Because she wants to sit center-ice," he told the person on the other end. "And we both know damn well that whatever Lily wants, Lily gets."
I grinned at that and settled onto the opposite end of the bench, opening my newspaper, scanning the headlines. Nothing caught my attention. Each article described some variation on the themes of love, pride, hate, lust, justice, greed, charity, wrath, courage, grief, and hope. That litany of vice and virtue, playing itself out against upon the stage of human history. Nothing new happened in the world. Not even in Hobbes Landing. Such as it were. Not even if this dubious endeavor wound up getting me killed.
I settled on the Life Section when I saw a photograph of Woodrow Sykes. It was a recent picture, and the man still didn't look a day over seventy. He wore the same plaid flat cap that he'd worn when I interviewed him in January for the Creek Reader's retrospective Student Spotlight.
He had told me that his wife had bought that hat in July of 1929, a few months before the stock-market crash. If he had told the same story to the writer from USA Today, that reporter hadn't found it worth mentioning. I had.
A woman approached the bus stop carrying an attaché case. She might have been five years older than me. She wore a Rutgers class ring and no wedding band, with her auburn hair cut short and flipped out at the ends. I read the story in the Life Section of my newspaper. Roosevelt Park in Edison Township was hosting a public poetry festival on April 4th. Sykes would be performing.
More than two dozen poets would be in attendance. Cyrus Cassells and Julianna Baggott were coming in from Delaware. Amiri Baraka was scheduled to read. Ron Silliman would be there, and so would the only known writer of Wenrohronon descent, Aquila Pomarina.
I finished the story, and glanced across the street to the payphone next to the front door of Pete's Pour House. I decided that if I did not die today, I was going to attend that public poetry festival. I would take Amber.
7.
I decided to give Hank fourteen minutes to show up.
That was when the next bus would arrive heading west. I read the Roosevelt Park poetry festival article a second time, and realized that I had no idea what the man named Hank or his car looked like. The man sitting at the opposite end of the bench from me might be Hank, and I had just asked him when the bus would arrive.
That would be just my luck. But I put that problem aside, because it was only a problem, and because there was nothing to do about it now. Hank would show up, or he would not. If he did, I would recognize him. I didn't know how, but I believed it. I would recognize him.
And if no one showed up at The Pour House, and the b
us came and went and took the man with the cellphone and the woman with the attaché case with it, I would walk back up to St. Ursula, climb back into the Wagoneer, and decide what to do then. Maybe I would end up at 30th Street Station after all. Maybe Hobbes Landing would be the last waystation before I rode off into my own personal undiscovered country in an Amtrak railcar.
But I didn't think too precisely on the event. Whatever would be would be, as the Oscar-winning song went. And I still had the rest of my newspaper to read. So I read it.
Twelve minutes after that, I glanced up from the Sports Section and checked the front of the tavern. No one had approached the bar since I had hung up the phone. Traffic passed on Hucknall, headed west to Collingswood, headed east to Springdale. And a moment later, I caught sight of a Dodge Shelby Dakota pickup rolling up Cortland toward the intersection. I watched the truck pull to a stop at the light, and a shard of sunlight kicked off something through the windshield. Something dangling from the rearview mirror on a thin chain. Something that looked blue.
I looked down at the Sports Section again. The light changed, and the Dakota turned left onto Hucknall. The driver crossed all four lanes of traffic and eased toward the parking lane in front of the bus stop. The truck passed so close that I confirmed what I had initially only suspected. I saw what was dangling from the rearview mirror.
A cornicello made of blue jasper on a thin steel chain.
Rage exploded like heat-lightning across the surface of my brain. That sweltering scarlet veil crashed down on me like a murderous tornado reaching out of a bloody thunderhead. I sucked in a hot breath, tasted brimstone and cordite burningthe back of my throat. I blew out the breath, replaced it, watched the black pickup pull forward into a space at the curb in front of a hobby shop.
The newspaper rattled in my hands, and I dredged up every ounce of my own infinite will. I burned it all forcing myself not to react, not to move, not to stand from this bench and charge down the sidewalk and smash in the Dakota's passenger window with my bare fist.
The Danger of Being Me Page 24
